Phillies Offense Explodes In Shortened Win vs Cards

The rain didn’t stop the Phillies offense from being en fuego tonight.

In a rain-shortened game, the Phillies offense exploded for eight runs in Friday night’s contest against the Cardinals. They scored five runs in the first, an outburst that began with a walk–yes, one of THOSE–by Chase Utley. On the mound, Roy Halladay threw a second solid game in a row, giving up just two run over seven innings.

GOOD NEWS OUT OF BOSTON

This isn’t game related, but deserves to be mentioned. The 2nd suspect in the Boston Marathon terror attacks has been taken into custody–alive. This is a huge sigh of relief for everyone. The police did a fantastic job and they deserve the utmost praise.

THE STREAK IS OVER

The horrendous streak of games without a walk came to an end in the first inning when Chase Utley walked with two outs. Kevin Frandsen later drew another walk to lead off the bottom of the third. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Phils offense scores some runs when they draw walks. It also helped that they got extra base hits from Jimmy Rollins, Humberto Quintero, John Mayberry Jr, and Ben Revere (!!!).

HALLADAY SOLID AGAIN

Is Roy Halladay out of his funk? For the second game in a row, he pitched 7+ innings while giving up < 2 runs. His pitch speed was again a positive, and he dominated the Cardinal hitters all night. He gave up only two hits–both via solo home runs. Here’s his line: 7 IP, 2 H, 2 R, 2BB, 6 K. Can’t blame this one on a bad opposing offense. It’s good to see Doc pitching well again, and he lowered his season ERA to 6.04. (It’s hard not to chuckle at that)

The Phillies are back at it again tomorrow night with Lance Lynn on the mound for the Cardinals and Cliff Lee on the mound for the Phillies.

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33 Comments

DavidE

April 19, 2013 at 10:09 pm

I guess the Cardinals didn’t learn what the Phillies learned last year. You can’t use Ty Wiggington at 3rd base. He gave the Phillies 3 runs in the 1st inning. He has some value as a left fielder or third baseman but he doesn’t have the defensive skills any more to play 3rd base.

Yes.
I think the Mets are going to be surprisingly good.
Before the season, I predicted they had the potential to finish in third place ahead of the Phillies for third place in the NL East. Admittedly, that prediction was more due to what I felt was a dismal off-season reorganization in Philadelphia than any great gains in New York.
The Mets “winning” baseball may actually translate into a .500 season this year but not too many pundits have picked them to be that good. What I believe will be winning about their club is attitude and that’s something they can build off of next year. If the team’s financial woes are behind them by then I believe they could become competitive almost as fast as the Nationals rose to prominence.
The Mets are likely playing slightly better then their ultimate record by the end of this season but the Phillies are currently playing at a level I expected them to be at when it’s mercifully over.
Frankly, I’d almost prefer to see the Phils finish in 4th place. Mediocrity can breed more mediocrity while dismal is more likely to lead to change.
In any event, I don’t believe either team is much better or much worse than their current records, so 3rd place will likely go to the team that stays the healthiest.

You just gave a positive review of the Mets possibilities without mentioning any players or areas of strength that would propel them to greater heights.

Perhaos you’d like to do so beyond the obvious starting point of Bryan Harvey since one man, and a questionable bullpen don’t exactly visibly translate to shaking the trend of a minimum of 2 years in a row of playing winning baseball early, and then bottoming out. That includes a memory (not to be confused with fact) of them being in 1st place in May 2 years ago.

Let’s get something straight about Ruben being ridded of his responsibilities. Anybody guessing as to when or if he’ll be fired based on club performance has zero or less clue what they speak of

Someone with inner workings of Dave Montgomery’s mentality on the subject is far more on track. Even that might be a stretch from legitimacy because I don’t even know if in the Phils structure, he would singularly make the call.

But assuming Monty is the decisionmaker, that’s all that matters. And I love the way people that read all the criticism of Amaro leap to that conclusion and are faster than quick to ignore the fact that he’s got 8 mil left on his contract AFTER this year.without reaching in their pockets and ponying up any funds to offset what’s a serious outlay of funds to reassign or eat.

The only “fact” we know for sure is that Monty stood up to an awful lot of criticism of Ed Wafe before he finally pulled the plug. Whether or not that is even relavant to a next time is speculation.

Executives are not judged solely by 1 area, even in sports where W-L powerfully stares back.
The Amaro regime is plenty controversial, but even then, you could count on 1 hand the number of peeps that get that almost every GM in history has black marks on their transaction resume. And for all most of us know, Amaro might work very favorably behind the scenes in non publicly viewed areas that have Monty pretty satisfied with some factors that enter into such a decision.

Such speculation, even if it turns out close in timing is nonsense. Offering opinions on Amaro decisions is one thing, though even then people often don’t know everything entailed by being on the inside and are just venting in fanspeak.

Ok my hope was the Phillies could hang around .500 until Ruiz returns and Haladay straightens himself out. After that they should easily be able to win 3 out of every 5 games which would put them at 95 wins.

Not to read into quotes too much, even though that’s exactly what I’m doing here, but when they don’t exactly know what hit them, or pick up pitches after the fact but way of video, it’s probably a sign of a well pitched game. It is SUCH a pessimistic feeling watching Doc go to the mound and not feel high confidence in a positive likelihood. I’d like to think we’re at least temporarily removed from that after last night’s effort against a good hitting club.

“Once he got on a roll he’s the caliber of pitcher who can stay on that roll for a while,” Matheny said. “He threw a lot of pitches (109). We just weren’t able to capitalize.”

During the brief delay, Wigginton watched replays of all three of his plate appearances against Halladay, including his four-pitch walk in the seventh. He said he found a single pitch from Halladay that he could have driven, and he didn’t get ahold of it.

“You see a lot of pitches down at the knees and out at the corner,” Wigginton said. “Any time a pitcher does that, he’s going to be tough. We only got two hits in the game so he was doing something right.”

I am good at looking at past performance and how it will translate in the future.
Comes from making money betting on horses where you look at the program.
I also learned that betting against my friends horses may sometimes be the right move. Thus no attachment .

If this team implodes to 100 losses and theres 20 000 people in the stands and Charlie is already gone ( he will be the first to go).

Even the worst person in charge of an orginazation would see you need to make a change.

But maybe not.

To me Ruben has steered the titanic into the iceburg many times. And he seems to back up and run into it again.

I am amazed he has his job now.
So who knows.

But you can mark this down. And Ive been remakably accurate in my predictions over the years.

Until he is releaved of his duties this team is on square one.

We can root and hope and love our team. Heck they may even make a run this year which wed all love.

But until hes gone we arent winning a WS and we are on go. Actually dont touch go go straight to jail. .

Really doesn’t matter much how accurate my recollection is, but it’s been a long time since you offered any time frames on how long he’d be here. So I wasn’t talking about you on guesses of when he gets axed, if that does indeed happen. Many of your views him are worth thinking about, on the club, too. I’m very pragmatic about most baseball opinions, so I don’t jump, and I just thnk sometimes people think their better positioned to have a view than they are, including me, but I do try not to cross that line. Either way, that part’s fine, but this throwing dates around when peeps assumedly have no idea what the guy in charge is thinking just seems amateurish.

Point is, I was hardly talking about you, so not even sure why you replied when you didn’t tell me it’s winners circle night, which I already knew but would have expected to be the point. Or the all important fantasy update. Probably see ya Sunday. Knock ’em dead..

You know I’m not sure why this hadn’t dawned on me before now, but does Doc get a “CG” for last night? I’ve been out of the Phils mainstream a little due Boston the last 18 hours so forgive my ignorance. I mean if the game was only 7 innings and he pitched 7 innings, that’s a CG right?

Woo hoo… everybody hits! It’s one of those feel good moments from last night’s game. It’s baseball and the unpredictablity (never mind all those advanced stats that says otherwise) of game situations is what makes it a great sport.

Great to see Roy Halladay pitching so well again. Whatever problems he may have had..mechanics, rhythm, velocity or simply trying to do too much appears to be behind him now. I norticed on this thread a implied skepticism rather than praise for Halladay’s performance last night. That does not surprise me given the attitude of some here. Even the consistent velocity of 89-92 MPH did not elicit any kind words for Halladay.

In mentioning the performance of Halladay, I watched the highly anticipated matchup of 24-year-old phenoms Mets’ Harvey and Nats’ Strasburg yesterday. These two future greats are certainly good for baseball. Harvey won the first round as he simply dominated the Nats’ line-up and now have an eye opening 4-0 record in the first month of the season. A Cy Young candidate? That would make it two seasons in a row for the Mets (smile).

By the way, for the beard loving fans of Jayson Werth who is being paid $16 million this season looked pitiful against Harvey but then so did the rest of the Nats line-up. I do have this feeling that Nats’ owner(s) will eventually regret in handing a 7 year contract worth $126 million to a player not “worthy” named Werth.

Interesting lineup tonight. RyHo took infield, not necessarily even testing for tonight, but sits again, but Charlie opted for a Firstberry night against the righthander. And Galvis plays left again. Laynce Nix’s heroic shot for Doc 6 days ago has clearly earned him minimal brownie points. One woukld think this lineup capable of scoring in the 4-5 range against Lynn, who, for what it’s worth has fallen victim to a .283 BAA as opposed to last year’s fine W-L, not terrible 3.7 ERA that included a .253 BAA. David Freese is back in the Card lineup. That’s a shame on multiple fronts..

I saw that play in real time, the umps blew it because he was tagged twice, the second time was after he went back to second, he took his foot off, and therefore the second tag.

And now for the rest of the story-

After all that, Segura tried to steal AGAIN 3-5 minutes later, and was caught stealing at second. The announcer said he might be the only player in baseball to get tagged out three times in one inning.